Sir David Attenborough's love of books

The first book I really can see now if I shut my eyes was an extraordinary book called Fox's Book of Martyrs and it must be a 17th century book. It belonged to my grandfather who I never met but it was left to my uncle and it was lodged in our house and it contained the most hair-raising engravings of people having their guts pulled out and being burned alive. And in its time it was a very famous book and no doubt it was a very valuable book. But I was absolutely fixated by these images of terrible things happening to human beings. Human beings doing terrible things to other human beings. So Fox's Book of Martyrs is the first book which I can remember pages of if I just shut my eyes. One of the first which I read over and over again but I haven't, to be truthful, I haven't read it for a very long time was called Wild Animals I Have Known by a man called Ernest Thompson Seaton who was a ranger on the Canadian prairie and a very considerable artist, well a very competent artist. I mean he drew lots of illustrations of these animals that he knew and there were also along the margins, along the outer margins of the text, there were footprints so you could imagine yourself tracking these things. And they were personified, the animals were personified to the extent that I could give you their names now. I mean Raggy Lug, the cottontail rabbit, for example, Lobo, the wolf. And King of the Kurumpur was Lobo. And I wept buckets of when Raggy Lug's mother was killed by a animal stories which were, they weren't given all those number of human characteristics, they were real animals alright. And they were animals that had names but they were real animals and I believed everything he wrote. And he was a very very good naturalist. Well as a biologist I have to say that printed books are a very, one of a very important category of things which Richard Dawkins has called memes. That is to say they are things in which the human experience is embedded and handed on from generation to generation but outside the body. They're nothing to do with the sort of genes which, you know, he called them memes. And they are the way in which one generation passes on experience and knowledge and wisdom over generations. And that's why fundamentally books are important. And they've been important of course since the end of the 15th century. I mean that was 600 years pretty well. And if it wasn't for books there's no way in which you could have conveyed that information until the coming of the electronic age in which has, to some extent, replaced books. Certainly to some extent replaced writing. But there's 600 years of experience that's hanging out there and they couldn't all be transcribed by hand. So they had to be transcribed by thinking. Well I suspect that people would say that he was fairly uncultured. I am ashamed really that my knowledge of literature is as poor as it is. But every now and again, about every 15 or 20 years, I suddenly said, do you realise you just don't know this author, that author, the other people talking about. And I try and give myself a course. I first started in the late teens when I read, realised that I have never read Brompteus and I'd never read Tolstoy, I'd never read Dostoevsky, all these things. I'd better do so because how can you go on talking about people pretending you've read them. But the number, so the number of works of fiction on my shelves is shamefully poor, shamefully few. They would think that I was interested in natural history, they would think that I was interested in the history of natural history. I mean I actually collect early books, early history books. And so they would think I had a fair interest in that. And I hope that they would think that I liked good writing, not necessarily fiction, but certainly good travel writing and so on. And that those were my interests. I was particularly interested in tribal art, which has the uncomfortable business of producing very, very heavy, large volumes at a great expense for you to look through, usually of the same objects. But nevertheless I tend to buy those. Certainly one of my favourite books, which I read when I was, I suppose, about 12 or 14, was Alfred Russell Wallace's Travels in the Far East in Search of the Birds of Paradise, The Islands of the Eastern Archipelago, it was called. And I thought he was a marvellous man, and indeed he was, full of insight and compassion for the people he met. He was entirely by himself for getting on for eight years, I think, wandering around in the islands of Eastern Indonesia and Western New Guinea and Borneo. And he writes brilliantly and says marvellous things. That's a book I admire very much and have done since I first read it, when I was, I'd say, 12 or 14. Oh yes, there are some passages, some very famous passages. There are one or two passages in books. I mean, the last page of The Origin of the Species, which has a very, very famous paragraph of Darwin's about looking at the Tangled Bank in an English headrow and seeing how all these things fit together, which is a memorable, except of course I can't remember it, I've ate it, but it is a very memorable and important summary of his attitude. And then one or two paragraphs like that in Wallace about the thrill of seeing a butterfly that he had been pursuing for a long time, eventually actually having it in his hand and saying, I felt terribly faint, the blood rushed to my head and my heart beat fast and I thought that I was on the verge of fainting. Charming sort of, I was going to say naive, but straightforwardly, honestly, about his own reactions. There's that and there's another very famous paragraph in which he says that he gazed on birds of paradise or beautiful things and thought, why is it that such a thing of such extraordinary beauty has evolved in wild places where no civilised human being has ever seen before? And that leads him to the end to say, so I'm bound to conclude, that they came into existence with no thought of humanity, no thought of mankind, and they will go on evolving in spite of mankind. Mankind has got nothing to do with what they are. Well, one of my most precious books is Lucretius. It was published in Venice in 1515 by Aldus Minucius, who was a Venice printer who published the equivalent of penguins, the equivalent of paperbacks. All the great classical authors, or most of them, were published by Aldus Minucius in a small, by Newton, book like that size, in a wonderfully elegant, italic script typeface. And that belonged to my grandfather, the same man who had belonged to Fox's book of martyrs, and he left it to my father. And my grandfather died in 1922, which was four years before I was born, and my father and mother left it to me, and I treasure that very much, for both my parents and my grandparents, who I never met. Well, no, I met them when I was about three, about once.